Maxime de la Rocheterie on Marie-Antoinette

"She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr."

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

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Monday, May 5, 2014

Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and
Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25
about the Gospel of John discovery: "It is beyond reasonable doubt that
this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment
is a fake too."
Alin Suciu,
a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic
manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the
evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic
surrounding the Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."

Having
evaluated the evidence, many specialists in ancient manuscripts and
Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard Divinity School were
the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed that radiometric
tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity), because the
Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely ancient
piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had identified
the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the
Raman
spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.

It
is perhaps understandable that Ms. King would have been taken in when
an anonymous owner presented her with some papyrus fragments for
research. What is harder to understand was the rush by the media and
others to embrace the idea that Jesus had a wife and that Christian
beliefs have been mistaken for centuries. No evidence for Jesus having
been married exists in any of the thousands of orthodox biblical
writings dating to antiquity. You would have thought
Thomas Aquinas
might have mentioned it. But this episode is not totally without
merit. It will provide a valuable case study for research classes long
after we're gone and the biblical texts remain. (Read more.)

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